Cattle Ranchers New Venture is …

So you're a cattle rancher, here's what others are doing to make additional funds.

They're becoming brewers! Think about it, you have a barn, plenty of space for some mash tons as well as an event space that you can hang chandeliers and other decoratives in. That's what more and more ranchers are doing these days:

Wagon wheel and barbed wire chandeliers hang from the ceiling of the nearly 70-year-old round-top barn built by Jewell Doan Sr.

Wood from an old cattle barn, some of it aged more than 130 years, hangs on the wall.

A Soo Line railroad bridge running across the ranch’s section of Hawk Creek provided some of the lumber for the “saloon” and a petrified skull from an old buffalo jump on the property hangs above the bar.

Each part of the barn turned event center at the Black Leg Ranch tells a story about the homestead, settled by the Doan family in 1882. And now Jay Doan is writing yet another chapter into the operation’s storybook that, like everything else in the building, harkens to the history of the homeplace.

Black Leg Brewery is preparing to distribute its own beers within the next month. This business venture is just the latest the next generation has added over the past decade.

“We’ve been trying to develop more agricultural-based tourism for a number of years,” said North Dakota Tourism Director Sara Otte Coleman.

That story was from the Bismarck Tribune, but the narrative is the same all across the great plains. Ranchers are looking at their ranches in a multi-purpose light. There's an opportunity for tourism, brewery development and for some, event space development for local bands.